Friday, July 11

Star Trek: Supremacy

One of the best ways I have for learning is to follow in the footsteps of others. There is plenty of Open Source Software to learn from, but not a whole lot I find of interest. Thanks again to Jeff Atwood; I've found an interesting project to look at. Star Trek: Supremacy is the successor to Birth of the Federation; a game I played a lot after it came out years ago. The developer took it open source, so I am going to take a look.

I downloaded and installed the game, and after some false starts with the version of .NET, I got it running. It looks pretty much the same as the original. I can't get too far with it because I can't seem to build anything. Anyway, I want to get the code. I install TortoiseCVN and the SVNBridge CodePlex wants, and for the next hour, download 100Mb of code and resources.

2 comments:

Hi there, i'm Matress_of_evil from the BOTF2 forums - i'm helping make Supremacy and am actually in the middle of a major content update, including fixing some glitchy buildings as well as adding in a lot of buildings too.

I noticed that you said you can't build any buildings - are none appearing in the build screen? Or is it another problem? Are you getting error messages of some kind? Make sure you have the latest version of the game, as Mike regularly releases updates.

The latest version of Supremacy contains an auto-updater that runs when you play the game, but you need to have a version of the game that is less than a month old for it to work; older versions of the game did not come with this feature. You can find the latest Supremacy info here:

I also noticed you said you had some "false starts". Again, are you getting any error messages? If the game crashes, open your Supremacy folder and look for a file called "Error.txt" or "ServerError.txt". Error messages will be kept in those. If you could post these error messages on our forums we might be able to track down the cause. The above files will only appear if the game crashes; they will be deleted the next time you load the game, so please check your Supremacy folder straight after a crash.

Please also make sure that you've got the .Net 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta update - 99.9% of the most recent error reports have been because this update has either not been installed or did not install correctly. This update MUST be installed correctly before the game will work. You can get the update from here: